Here are some quick notes and reflections from a “Online Infrastructure for Organizing Against the PIC” at the Allied Media Conference yesterday. Very exciting workshop led by Keith Deblasio from AdvoCare, Silky Shah and Wil Coley from Detention Watch Network and Paul Wright from Prison Legal News. Folks from Critical Resistance facilitated this brainstorming and problem solving workshop. I was specifically thinking about my work with the The Illinois Community Justice Project and our efforts to build a wiki based clearinghouse for information on incarceration, detention, and policing in Illinois, so my notes probably reflect the concerns I've got for that project.
The discussion centered around themes of reach and impact, content generation and online community building, and infrastructure needs. Below are my fairly raw notes from the session. My apologies if they aren't particularly useful or coherent as presented. Folks from Thousand Kites have committed to distributing information about and implementing some of these strategies.
Content
We need to be Taking already existing activity and turn it into content. Listserv traffic can become content. Group conversation is content. Creating content in offline spaces, like letter writing, poster making, etc, and posting it online.
How do we make non-digital media digital and address access issues. Tamms Year Ten has done a good job bringing prisoner's letters online. Thousand Kites takes it both ways, putting prisoners' voices online, and rebroadcasting them to folks inside, along with responses. Using people’s stories can be isolating and alienating, we have to make sure accountability and reciprocity are built into the process.
How can visitation be a point of access? How do we let folks who do have access inside info about available tools, use visitation as an access point for info? Record, distro live call-ins.
Reach/impact
How do we reach the movable middle? Community radio can be a central piece to reach multiple generations and rural communities. Combining this radio piece with community forums can generate new content, reach new folks. Get it into schools. Develop into curriculum, critical reflection on media. Online and live, both and, not either or.
Infrastructure
Can we link among each other, boost page ranks, build search engine optimization.
The digital divide is still a huge issue. Print and radio are still very important, as is building curriculum for teachers.
Big questions remain. How do we share skills across organizations? How do we increase the signal to noise ratio? How do we more effectively get our messages out to mainstream media?
